drinking beer and felling trees!

Not many things go together better than drinking beer, and felling a tree with an axe! We have had a couple good friends hangin out with us for the last week or so. When we manage to stop sitting around drinking beer we have been able to make some real progress. Most importantly cutting down our main mast!!! It all started when my buddy DJ and I decided to take a drunken romp around the woods in “search” of a mast… Surprisingly we actually found one! A sweet tall narrow white fir. I would prefer to use douglas fir, but we were not able to find one of good enough quality to make a spar. When hunting for a spar you are looking for a tree that is strait obviously, but there’s more to it. You want to look for thick woods where the trees can’t grow in diameter, so they grow in height. They will grow tall, strait, and clear in search of the sun. This will also give you a tree with really tight grain. These are the reasons we went with this white fir rather than a lesser quality doug. We started off very carefully surveying the situation.

Once satisfied with our calculations we forged ahead!

Once down we started limbing everything.

Now all we have to do is figure out how the hell were gonna get this thing out of the woods…..

We started off with a combination of come alongs, leverage, and brute strength to move it closer to the truck.

We were able to bush whack the truck to within a couple hundred feet, so we grabbed one of our 200ft anchor lines, and tied a big snatch block to a tree to control the pulling angle.

We managed to drag the thing out of the woods, but only with the proper application of beer, redneck ingenuity, and rebel calls…

More pictures of this endeavor to come when we figure out how to get them off of Ruth’s phone!